After the oil company that employs Arthur Dashwood fails to protect him from a kidnap attempt in Baghdad, he returns to his traumatised family in London. But everything is not as it should be. Having quit the blistering heat and swimming pool luxury of Saudi Arabia for fear of terrorist attack, Arthur finds that danger is closer to home. Arthur's young son Timothy is struggling in the hostile terrain of his new public school. Bullied by other pupils and neglected by his preoccupied parents, he withdraws into a fantasy world, a hybrid of computer-generated guerrilla warzone and exotic dreams of his time in Saudi Arabia, a place where boys can fight and escape their teachers and families. As one middle-class boy from Timothy's school and then another disappears, so evidence emerges of an extreme and disturbing rejection of the adult world. And then it is Timothy's turn to disappear. Haunted by memories of post-Saddam Baghdad, Arthur embarks on a terrifying search for his son, one that will reveal his own complicity in the brutal consequences of Western power.